Today we decide

Gov. Mitt Romney speaks frequently of the contrast between his own governing philosophy and President Obama’s “trickle down government” worldview. What does he mean by this phrase?

To Obama, government is the primary engine of economic growth. The bigger the footprint, the better, and so long as government is spending, where the money actually goes is merely a secondary concern. Federal spending for fiscal year 2013 is now projected to be 22.8 percent of the overall economy. A second-term stimulus would surely raise this figure, but as we saw after the 2009 stimulus, the expected job creation is hardly assured.

Obama sees government as the authority responsible for granting us our rights. The list of rights now enshrined by progressives ranges from health care to “living” wages and now all the way to free contraception. Never mind that when rights become routine grants by government, they shift with the prevailing attitudes of the day and lose their character as permanent protections from government. After all, what protection do we need from a government so benevolent as to grant us these gifts?

And because this benevolence is presumed by progressives like Obama, the rule of law becomes a mere formality, an obstacle to be circumvented by executive officials whose good intentions might otherwise be stonewalled by an intransigent legislature. Immigration laws need not be amended when they can be ignored, and new laws like Obamacare and the Dodd-Frank financial reform are conveniently tailored to grant legislative authority to federal bureaucrats. Rule of law becomes rule by fiat. The people should hesitate to ratify this shift.

Most importantly, to Obama, government and civil society are one and the same. This is the heart of the “You didn’t build that” speech, which rankled conservatives not merely for the infamous phrase but also for the broader conflation of societal contributions to individual success with government achievement.

Society and government, of course, are not one and the same. As the always eloquent Yuval Levin observes, “most of life is lived somewhere between [the citizen and the state], and American life in particular has given rise to unprecedented human flourishing because we have allowed the institutions that occupy the middle ground — the family, civil society and the private economy — to thrive in relative freedom.” When our government’s leaders forget this, they become blind to the consequences their decisions have on other actors in our society.

Mitt Romney recognizes that the stimulus that bought the country sidewalks to ditches, bridges to nowhere and investments in failed green energy firms like Solyndra also burdened us with $800 billion in debt. Whatever jobs were created to support the wasteful projects financed by the stimulus were fleeting, yet the debt remains with us. We’ll be the ones to pay it — if it ever gets paid at all.

Romney understands that our true rights come from God and that the positive rights granted us by government inevitably become impositions on others. Nothing in life is free. When government determines that health care is a right, it must get doctors to provide the care, a task made more difficult by reimbursement cuts. When bureaucrats decide that all women have a right to free contraception, the burden falls on employers and insurers to make good on the government’s promise. These new positive rights inevitably come into conflict with our old negative protections. Today, the Catholic Church is finding that its supposedly inalienable right to free exercise of its faith comes into question when tradition stands in the way of “progress.”

Furthermore, Romney understands that the rule of law is an essential cornerstone in any democratic society and prosperous economy. He will repeal Obamacare and its Independent Payment Advisory Board, refine Dodd-Frank and rein in Environmental Protection Agency administrators’ long leash. Rule by laws, not czars, will be the order of the day, granting confidence to business and restoring the proper balance between the legislature and the executive.

There is a better way to get our country back on track than faith in government: We can empower individuals to pursue their own dreams in their own ways. This means real tax reform financed by eliminating the advantages afforded to the big corporations with the best tax attorneys. It means allowing Americans to take advantage of the country’s enormous domestic energy stockpile. It means freeing employers from the burdensome insurance mandates imposed by Obamacare. It means addressing the looming entitlement crisis head on in order to boost the confidence of domestic business and global markets.

This is the choice: one candidate deeply convinced of his own bureaucratic experts’ extraordinary competence at administering the affairs of hundreds of millions of citizens and tens of millions of small businesses, versus another with faith that the American people can do their work better without micromanagement. We’ve had four long years with a president deeply committed to a government-centered economy and society. Do we really want another term? Can we afford it?

Mitt Romney’s running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, frequently frames this election as a decision about “what kind of country we’re going to have, what kind of people we’re going to be.”